Rails Plugins. Made Practical.

Errata

Rails Plugins are constantly evolving. Some of the plugins featured in the book will doubtlessly change over time, and that’s a good thing! However, it also presents the possibility that some of the examples in the book may not work with newer versions of plugins found at the plugin authors’ sites.

If you wish to get the latest and greatest features, the authors’ sites and README files will always be the de facto source for the most up-to-date version of that plugin. However, for your convenience we’ve also archived the plugin versions used in the book. If you wish to use these versions, please see the Source Code & Downloads section of this website and/or download the working examples as shown in the book.

The following is a list of known errata for Practical Rails Plugins:

• Chapter 1: The location of the annotate_models plugin has changed from http://svn.pragprog.com/svn/Public/plugins/annotate_models to http://repo.pragprog.com/svn/Public/plugins/annotate_models

• Chapter 3: The references to app/views/documents.new.html.erb on the caption for listing 3-16 should read app/views/documents/new.html.erb.

• Chapter 4: The install directions for Acts as Versioned plugin via SVN are wrong; please use the git version instead as follows:

  ruby script/plugin install git://github.com/technoweenie/acts_as_versioned.git

  The included Riff repository is no longer accessible; download riff from http://tfletcher.com/dev/rails-plugins instead. Listing 4-3 should have an extra end at the end of the listing.

• Chapter 9: The current version of Comatose (0.8.1) is incompatible with Rails 2.1. This chapter’s examples will work fine as long as Rails 2.0.2 is being used. For 2.1 compatibility, you may with to use the 2.0 alpha version of the plugin currently available on GitHub (ruby script/plugin install git://github.com/darthapo/comatose.git). We’ve tested it and it seems to work great!

• Chapter 13: The correct author for the Rails Authorization DSL plugin is Bill Katz.

• Chapter 19: If you want previous and next links to appear, images should all belong to the same “set”. To do this use the following additional html option in the helper: :rel => "lightbox[set]"

• Chapter 21: Brian Kaney’s CSS Graphy plugin is no longer available at its original location. You can still install the plugin from our Subversion source code mirror, however.

• Chapter 22: There is an extra slash in the Liquid install directions; they should read as follows:

  ruby script/plugin install http://liquid-markup.googlecode.com/svn/trunk

  On page 355, the first line should be <ul>, and not <li>.

  On page 351, the following code:

  "<a href='#{@user.profile_url}'>" <<
  "<%=@user.profile_url%></a>"

  should be:

  "<a href='#{@user.url}'>" <<
  "#{@user.url}</a>"

• Chapter 25: Listing 25-3 is missing a left brace; the string #{Time.now.to_f.to_s#{rand(1024)} should look like #{Time.now.to_f.to_s}#{rand(1024)}. The revised code listing is as follows:

        class Url < ActiveRecord::Base
          validates_presence_of :url
          validates_uniqueness_of :shortcode
          after_validation :ensure_shortcode_exists
  
          def ensure_shortcode_exists
            if self.shortcode.nil?
              until !self.shortcode.nil? && Url.find_by_shortcode(self.shortcode).nil?
                self.shortcode = Digest::MD5.hexdigest("#{self.url}_" <<
                                                       "#{Time.now.to_f.to_s}#{rand(1024)}" 
                                                      ).to_i(16).to_s(32)
              end
            end
          end
        end

Found an error in the book that isn’t in this list? Please contact us with the details of the problem so we can add it to this list. Please make sure to include the page number and a brief description of the problem. Thanks!